Housing Markets with Indifferences: A Tale of Two Mechanisms

Publication

Publication

The (Shapley-Scarf) housing market is a well-studied and
fundamental model of an exchange economy. Each agent
owns a single house and the goal is to reallocate the houses to
the agents in a mutually beneficial and stable manner. Recently,
Alcalde-Unzu and Molis (2011) and Jaramillo and
Manjunath (2011) independently examined housing markets
in which agents can express indierences among houses.They
proposed two important families of mechanisms, known as
TTAS and TCR respectively. We formulate a family of mechanisms
which not only includes TTAS and TCR but also satisfies
many desirable properties of both families. As a corollary,
we show that TCR is strict core selecting (if the strict
core is non-empty). Finally, we settle an open question regarding
the computational complexity of the TTAS mechanism.
Our study also raises a number of interesting research
questions.